Speakers

Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi

Joanna co-authored/co-edited Laws, Language and Life: Howard Pattee’s classic papers on the physics of symbols with contemporary commentary with Pattee, which is one of the main book-length entry points into his work. She also continued developing Patteean themes herself, especially complementarity and replicable constraints in language and cognition.

Kalevi Kull

Kalevi Kull has admired Howard Pattee since he read the volumes of Towards a Theoretical Biology. They began a correspondence in 1999, when Kull was editing a special issue of Semiotica on Jakob Uexküll. They have been friends in biosemiotics ever since. They actually met in 2008. They published part of their conversation under the name A biosemiotic conversation: Between physics and semiotics.

Terrence Deacon

In How Molecules Became Signs, Deacon says the segregation of dynamical and structural constraints was described by Howard Pattee; in other origin-of-life contributions, Deacon and co-authors explicitly discuss Pattee’s notion of the epistemic cut and the distinction between physico-chemical dynamics and semiotic controls.

Peter Cariani

Cariani's PhD dissertation, On the Design of Devices with Emergent Semantic Properties, was directed by Pattee. On top of that, Cariani wrote Symbols and dynamics in the brain in the 2001 BioSystems issue devoted to reflections on Pattee’s work, which shows that his relation is not just biographical but deeply intellectual: Cariani develops Pattee’s symbol–dynamics framework in neuroscience, semiotics, and emergence.

Vahe Bedian

Between 1972 and 1975 Vahe Bedian had the privilege and pleasure of working with Howard Pattee as his thesis advisor at SUNY/Buffalo. The focus for Bedian's doctoral research, the origin of the genetic code, was rooted in Howard’s long-standing interest in the philosophical questions around the relationship between genotype and phenotype, or symbol and matter. Howard provided to him a uniquely stimulating and nurturing environment to pursue and explore these fundamental questions.

Silvano Colombano

Colombano was a graduate student under Howard Pattee at Binghamton University during the 1970s. Together, they explored fundamental questions regarding the origin of life and the genetic code. Their joint research focused on "self-description" and "self-reproduction," investigating how dynamical systems could evolve from ambiguous states into structured coding systems.

Cliff Joslyn

Cliff Joslyn is Chief Scientist for Knowledge Sciences and former Team Leader for Mathematics of Data Science at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, and Visiting Professor of Systems Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). He was previously a Team Leader in the Computer Science division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a postdoctoral scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Cliff pursues mathematical research in hypergraph analytics and computational topology, multi-dimensional data, uncertainty quantification, and hierarchy theory, and has led projects in semantic technologies, blockchain, sensor integration, and high-performance graph analytics. He holds a BA with High Honors in Cognitive Science and Mathematics from Oberlin College, an MS and PhD in Systems Science from Binghamton University (SUNY), and is a Senior Member of the ACM. At SUNY he studied under George Klir and Howard Pattee, and Valentin Turchin from City University of New York. His love of systems philosophy and biological semiotics was fostered by his work with Prof. Pattee.

Jon Umerez

Jon Umerez has provided what is considered a definitive historical overview of Pattee's work, particularly emphasizing his "internal epistemic stance" toward understanding life and complexity. Umerez even compiled the complete bibliography of Pattee's writings. A significant part of their public relationship involves Umerez's work, Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?, which attempts to place Pattee’s physics-based theories within the broader field of biosemiotics.

Eric Horvitz

As his mentor in Stanford University, Pattee influenced Eric Horvitz’s early thinking on the intersection of biology, physics, and information theory. Horvitz has often cited Pattee's work on "semantic closure," the idea that for a system to be "alive" or truly intelligent, it must be able to describe itself and act on those descriptions, as a foundational influence on his own research in artificial intelligence.

Eric Minch

Eric Minch’s doctoral thesis, titled Representation of Hierarchical Structure in Evolving Networks, was advised by Pattee at SUNY Binghamton in 1989. Following his time with Pattee, Minch transitioned into bioinformatics and became a Senior Scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, applying the systems-level thinking he developed during his studies.

Peter Wills

Peter Wills has extensively built upon Pattee’s principle of semantic closure, which argues that for a system to be alive, it must possess a symbolic description (like DNA) that it can physically implement through its own mechanisms. Wills' work is often seen as a physical grounding of Pattee's more philosophical concepts of the "epistemic cut," the necessary separation between physical laws and biological information.

Claudia Carello

Claudia Carello is professor emerita at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) at the University of Connecticut and, briefly, was a faculty member at Binghamton University. A leader of the Ecological Psychology movement, she and her colleagues engaged with Howard Pattee over several decades, and CESPA devoted one of its annual Iberall Lectures to Pattee. His well-known Cell Psychology paper was a response to the Ecological Psychologists.

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